7.2 Understanding HTTP 1.1 Response Headers

Following is a summary of the most useful HTTP 1.1 response headers. A good understanding of these headers can increase the effectiveness of your servlets, so you should at least skim the descriptions to see what options are at your disposal. You can come back for details when you are ready to use the capabilities.

These headers are a superset of those permitted in HTTP 1.0. The official HTTP 1.1 specification is given in RFC 2616. The RFCs are online in various places; your best bet is to start at http://www.rfc-editor.org/ to get a current list of the archive sites. Header names are not case sensitive but are traditionally written with the first letter of each word capitalized.

Be cautious in writing servlets whose behavior depends on response headers that are available only in HTTP 1.1, especially if your servlet needs to run on the WWW "at large" rather than on an intranetsome older browsers support only HTTP 1.0. It is best to explicitly check the HTTP version with request.getRequestProtocol before using HTTP-1.1-specific headers.

Allow

The Allow header specifies the request methods ( GET , POST , etc.) that the server supports. It is required for 405 ( Method Not Allowed ) responses. The default service method of servlets automatically generates this header for OPTIONS requests .

Cache-Control

This useful header tells the browser or other client the circumstances in which the response document can safely be cached. It has the following possible values.

  • public . Document is cacheable, even if normal rules (e.g., for password-protected pages) indicate that it shouldn't be.

  • private . Document is for a single user and can only be stored in private (nonshared) caches.

  • no-cache . Document should never be cached (i.e., used to satisfy a later request). The server can also specify " no-cache="header1,header2,...,header N " " to stipulate the headers that should be omitted if a cached response is later used. Browsers normally do not cache documents that were retrieved by requests that include form data. However, if a servlet generates different content for different requests even when the requests contain no form data, it is critical to tell the browser not to cache the response. Since older browsers use the Pragma header for this purpose, the typical servlet approach is to set both headers, as in the following example.

     
     response.setHeader("Cache-Control", "no-cache"); response.setHeader("Pragma", "no-cache"); 
  • no-store . Document should never be cached and should not even be stored in a temporary location on disk. This header is intended to prevent inadvertent copies of sensitive information.

  • must-revalidate . Client must revalidate document with original server (not just intermediate proxies) each time it is used.

  • proxy-revalidate . This is the same as must-revalidate , except that it applies only to shared caches.

  • max-age= xxx . Document should be considered stale after xxx seconds. This is a convenient alternative to the Expires header but only works with HTTP 1.1 clients . If both max-age and Expires are present in the response, the max-age value takes precedence.

  • s-max-age= xxx . Shared caches should consider the document stale after xxx seconds.

The Cache-Control header is new in HTTP 1.1.

Connection

A value of close for this response header instructs the browser not to use persistent HTTP connections. Technically, persistent connections are the default when the client supports HTTP 1.1 and does not specify a Connection: close request header (or when an HTTP 1.0 client specifies Connection: keep- alive ). However, since persistent connections require a Content-Length response header, there is no reason for a servlet to explicitly use the Connection header. Just omit the Content-Length header if you aren't using persistent connections.

Content-Disposition

The Content-Disposition header lets you request that the browser ask the user to save the response to disk in a file of the given name . It is used as follows :

 
 Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=  some-file-name  

This header is particularly useful when you send the client non-HTML responses (e.g., Excel spreadsheets as in Section 7.3 or JPEG images as in Section 7.5). Content-Disposition was not part of the original HTTP specification; it was defined later in RFC 2183. Recall that you can download RFCs by going to http://rfc-editor.org/ and following the instructions.

Content-Encoding

This header indicates the way in which the page was encoded during transmission. The browser should reverse the encoding before deciding what to do with the document. Compressing the document with gzip can result in huge savings in transmission time; for an example, see Section 5.4 (Sending Compressed Web Pages).

Content-Language

The Content-Language header signifies the language in which the document is written. The value of the header should be one of the standard language codes such as en , en-us , da , etc. See RFC 1766 for details on language codes (you can access RFCs online at one of the archive sites listed at http://www.rfc-editor.org/).

Content-Length

This header indicates the number of bytes in the response. This information is needed only if the browser is using a persistent (keep-alive) HTTP connection. See the Connection header for determining when the browser supports persistent connections. If you want your servlet to take advantage of persistent connections when the browser supports them, your servlet should write the document into a ByteArrayOutputStream , look up its size when done, put that into the Content-Length field with response.setContentLength , then send the content by byteArrayStream.writeTo(response.getOutputStream()) .

Content-Type

The Content-Type header gives the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) type of the response document. Setting this header is so common that there is a special method in HttpServletResponse for it: setContentType . MIME types are of the form maintype / subtype for officially registered types and of the form maintype /x- subtype for unregistered types. Most servlets specify text/html ; they can, however, specify other types instead. This is important partly because servlets directly generate other MIME types (as in the Excel and JPEG examples of this chapter), but also partly because servlets are used as the glue to connect other applications to the Web. OK, so you have Adobe Acrobat to generate PDF, GhostScript to generate PostScript, and a database application to search indexed MP3 files. But you still need a servlet to answer the HTTP request, invoke the helper application, and set the Content-Type header, even though the servlet probably simply passes the output of the helper application directly to the client.

In addition to a basic MIME type, the Content-Type header can also designate a specific character encoding. If this is not specified, the default is ISO-8859_1 (Latin). For example, the following instructs the browser to interpret the document as HTML in the Shift_JIS (standard Japanese) character set.

 
 response.setContentType("text/html; charset=Shift_JIS"); 

Table 7.1 lists some of the most common MIME types used by servlets. RFC 1521 and RFC 1522 list more of the common MIME types (again, see http://www.rfc-editor.org/ for a list of RFC archive sites). However, new MIME types are registered all the time, so a dynamic list is a better place to look. The officially registered types are listed at http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/media-types. For common unregistered types, http://www.ltsw.se/knbase/internet/mime.htp is a good source.

Table 7.1. Common MIME Types

Type

Meaning

application/msword

Microsoft Word document

application/octet-stream

Unrecognized or binary data

application/pdf

Acrobat (.pdf) file

application/postscript

PostScript file

application/vnd.lotus-notes

Lotus Notes file

application/vnd.ms-excel

Excel spreadsheet

application/vnd.ms-powerpoint

PowerPoint presentation

application/x-gzip

Gzip archive

application/x-java-archive

JAR file

application/x-java-serialized-object

Serialized Java object

application/x-java-vm

Java bytecode (.class) file

application/zip

Zip archive

audio/basic

Sound file in .au or .snd format

audio/midi

MIDI sound file

audio/x-aiff

AIFF sound file

audio/x-wav

Microsoft Windows sound file

image/gif

GIF image

image/jpeg

JPEG image

image/png

PNG image

image/tiff

TIFF image

image/x-xbitmap

X Windows bitmap image

text/css

HTML cascading style sheet

text/html

HTML document

text/plain

Plain text

text/xml

XML

video/mpeg

MPEG video clip

video/quicktime

QuickTime video clip

Expires

This header stipulates the time at which the content should be considered out-of-date and thus no longer be cached. A servlet might use this header for a document that changes relatively frequently, to prevent the browser from displaying a stale cached value. Furthermore, since some older browsers support Pragma unreliably (and Cache-Control not at all), an Expires header with a date in the past is often used to prevent browser caching. However, some browsers ignore dates before January 1, 1980, so do not use 0 as the value of the Expires header.

For example, the following would instruct the browser not to cache the document for more than 10 minutes.

 
 long currentTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); long tenMinutes = 10*60*1000; // In milliseconds response.setDateHeader("Expires",                        currentTime + tenMinutes); 

Also see the max-age value of the Cache-Control header.

Last-Modified

This very useful header indicates when the document was last changed. The client can then cache the document and supply a date by an If-Modified-Since request header in later requests. This request is treated as a conditional GET , with the document being returned only if the Last-Modified date is later than the one specified for If-Modified-Since . Otherwise, a 304 ( Not Modified ) status line is returned, and the client uses the cached document. If you set this header explicitly, use the setDateHeader method to save yourself the bother of formatting GMT date strings. However, in most cases you simply implement the getLastModified method (see the lottery number servlet of Section 3.6, "The Servlet Life Cycle") and let the standard service method handle If-Modified-Since requests.

Location

This header, which should be included with all responses that have a status code in the 300s, notifies the browser of the document address. The browser automatically reconnects to this location and retrieves the new document. This header is usually set indirectly, along with a 302 status code, by the sendRedirect method of HttpServletResponse . See Sections 6.3 (A Servlet That Redirects Users to Browser-Specific Pages) and 6.4 (A Front End to Various Search Engines) for examples.

Pragma

Supplying this header with a value of no-cache instructs HTTP 1.0 clients not to cache the document. However, support for this header was inconsistent with HTTP 1.0 browsers, so Expires with a date in the past is often used instead. In HTTP 1.1, Cache-Control: no-cache is a more reliable replacement.

Refresh

This header indicates how soon (in seconds) the browser should ask for an updated page. For example, to tell the browser to ask for a new copy in 30 seconds, you would specify a value of 30 with

 
 response.setIntHeader("Refresh", 30); 

Note that Refresh does not stipulate continual updates; it just specifies when the next update should be. So, you have to continue to supply Refresh in all subsequent responses. This header is extremely useful because it lets servlets return partial results quickly while still letting the client see the complete results at a later time. For an example, see Section 7.4 (Persistent Servlet State and Auto-Reloading Pages).

Instead of having the browser just reload the current page, you can specify the page to load. You do this by supplying a semicolon and a URL after the refresh time. For example, to tell the browser to go to http:// host/ path after 5 seconds, you would do the following.

 
 response.setHeader("Refresh", "5; URL=http://host/path/"); 

This setting is useful for "splash screens" on which an introductory image or message is displayed briefly before the real page is loaded.

Note that this header is commonly set indirectly by putting

 
 <META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh"       CONTENT="5; URL=http://host/path/"> 

in the HEAD section of the HTML page, rather than as an explicit header from the server. That usage came about because automatic reloading or forwarding is something often desired by authors of static HTML pages. For servlets, however, setting the header directly is easier and clearer.

This header is not officially part of HTTP 1.1 but is an extension supported by both Netscape and Internet Explorer.

Retry-After

This header can be used in conjunction with a 503 ( Service Unavailable ) response to tell the client how soon it can repeat its request.

Set-Cookie

The Set-Cookie header specifies a cookie associated with the page. Each cookie requires a separate Set-Cookie header. Servlets should not use response.setHeader("Set-Cookie", ...) but instead should use the special-purpose addCookie method of HttpServletResponse . For details, see Chapter 8 (Handling Cookies). Technically, Set-Cookie is not part of HTTP 1.1. It was originally a Netscape extension but is now widely supported, including in both Netscape and Internet Explorer.

WWW-Authenticate

This header is always included with a 401 ( Unauthorized ) status code. It tells the browser what authorization type ( BASIC or DIGEST ) and realm the client should supply in its Authorization header. For examples of the use of WWW-Authenticate and a discussion of the various security mechanisms available to servlets and JSP pages, see the chapters on Web application security in Volume 2 of this book.



Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages (Vol. 1.Core Technologies)
Core Servlets and Javaserver Pages: Core Technologies, Vol. 1 (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0130092290
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 194

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